Key Ideas

Key Ideas

• Stakeholders must be appropriately involved in large-scale assessment planning, design, and implementation, particularly when the results are likely to challenge current practices or policy. • To be maximally informative for education policy and practice, the content of a large-scale assessment should be representative of target knowledge domains and learning outcomes. • Collecting information on noncognitive factors (for example, sociodemographic, family, and school factors) linked to student achievement can inform changes in policy and practice to improve education outcomes and equity. • Technically proficient, well-trained staff can help ensure that large-scale assessments are designed and administered in accordance with best practices, which, in turn, increases stakeholder confidence in the results. • Large-scale assessment results should be disseminated in a timely fashion to stakeholders in language that they can understand and be presented in a way that is consistent with their information needs. Databases and technical information should be made available for secondary analyses. • Findings from large-scale assessments commonly influence education policy by helping define education standards, motivating curricular reform, influencing resource allocation, setting and monitoring learning targets, modifying classroom practices and teacher training, and informing ways to improve connections between home and school to support student learning.